He falls silent and looks at me without speaking.
I know he’s afraid. I know he knows that I’m afraid. We both know that this bloody fear will kill us. I’m too weak to kill him because, in the end, I like fear. But I like the desire to go on loving him even more.
Today, once again, he left without saying good-bye. And yesterday he came home without a surprise present: no ice cream (he used to bring me an ice cream almost every evening, with loads and loads of cherries), no film from the video shop, not even a kiss.
Yesterday as he was brushing his teeth, I came into the bathroom without knocking, and I saw him kneeling on the floor peering into the toilet bowl.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
Embarrassed, he drew himself upright and replied, “Nothing…”
I immediately understood the cause of his unease and, at the same time, his curiosity.
“I flushed it away,” I said. “There’s nothing to see.”
“I know, I’m not crazy like you,” he said cruelly, slaying me with his eyes.
As in the first months of our affair, we aren’t making love. Back then, abstaining before immersing ourselves in each other was a wonderful erotic game, though. Now it’s a source of unbearable pain, but I know it would be much more unbearable if we actually did make love. It’s as though his awareness of my sexuality has shrunk and is starting to crumble. I no longer want to fall in love with him, to be inside him.
His body was like a musical instrument. He was a marvelous grand piano, studded all over with white and black keys, and my fingers started playing it fearlessly, and yet they moved clumsily. I had no score, but his sighs and the light in his eyes told me that my melody bewitched him.
His body was a perfect contrast, his thick, burgeoning eyebrows spread out like a patch of hair allowed to grow at will. And his penis was a perfect fusion of angelic candor and devastating demonic power.
“You don’t love me anymore.”
“Is that a question?”
“No,” I answered.
“You’re the one who’s stopped loving me,” he said. “What’s destroying us?” I asked him.
“We are,” he replied.
“Go if you’re going,” I said.
Twenty-six
Now I know who Viola is.
All those weeks she’s had him many times, and she’s made love with him in every position, and I saw them having a coffee, hand in hand, during a lunch break. Her laughter constantly changed and his body transformed itself like soft clay into a body that was different every time. And he loved her on every occasion, whatever face or voice she was wearing that day.
I met her yesterday when I went into the pet shop where she works. She’s young, she isn’t beautiful — I don’t think any of the others are really beautiful — but I do think she’s his type, I’m convinced she could be. My first impulse was to hit her and kick her without losing my temper, coldly, deliberately. Strike her on that tight-fitting top, beneath which jutted two enormous breasts.
A man called her by name from the other side of the shop and that name was Viola.
I gritted my teeth as though I wanted to break them.
She looked at me sweetly and said, “Are you looking for something? Can I help?”
If you really want to do something, help me to take away those horrible images that are rooting themselves in my imagination. Please put your panties back on and get off that sofa; arrange your hair and twist it into a braid, reapply your lipstick and do up the zippers of your boots. Put on your scarf and your coat. And before you walk through that door, don’t say good-bye, just whisper, “This is the last time we’ll see each other. It was nice — you’re marvelous,” as you look at him lying there, powerful and naked, wondering why you’re leaving.
And when you go through that fucking door don’t cry, love. Don’t cry — that would hurt me too much. The idea that those big green eyes of yours might never again see the light of the sun, because I would have blinded them with the light of my fire.
Viola looks at me, while with startled eyes I watch the whole scene of my film play itself out.
“You’re Melissa, aren’t you?” she asks.
I nod and reply clumsily, “Yes, why?”
“I’ve seen you on TV a few times. I like you.” She goes on smiling. What the hell are you smiling at?
“And I’ve read your book,” she goes on. “I really liked it, although I’d have written it differently myself…”
Go fuck yourself, bitch. Go on, just show me what you would have done. Take a piece of paper and a pen and write a book, if you’re capable of it. But all you’re capable of is straddling the dick of the man who belongs to me, who will never give himself to you as he gave himself to me.
“I don’t need anything, thanks. I’ve got to go now,” I say as I make for the exit.
She watches me going without a word, and I know perfectly, I CAN SEE THEM, I see that her eyes have become a boundless green marsh that will soon, very soon, swallow me up.
Twenty-seven
Only a few weeks had passed since that night in Cosenza. Thomas and I were on a train taking us to the place where we would celebrate New Year’s Eve on our own.
“Do you have any idea where we could go?” I had asked him.
“A quiet place,” he had answered, “far away from everyone.”
So we had rented a little house surrounded by trees, lost among the Umbrian hills. It was red as a cherry, small and red.
There, we said, our dreams would meet at night, regardless of where we ourselves might be.
“When we’re far away from each other, our dreams will be there, and they’ll meet — we’ll see them twining in the air and they’ll dance in a close embrace to a symphony that hasn’t yet been composed,” he had said.
Inside, the house had yellow walls and terra-cotta floors, and if we walked around barefoot we could feel a vague, faint warmth spreading around the whole of our bodies.
Once inside, it was almost impossible to leave. I think a thin, poisonous cloud hung in the air above the bed and kept us from getting up. Three days passed as though the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the day, and the night belonged to other galaxies, other worlds. In that suspended red world, above the great green breast of those hills, the only thing that quivered with life was love, a gigantic, lost, stunned love. I sipped slow and long, and I gulped it down, a love that allowed us to stroke each other and sometimes to kiss, but never to plunge into the deepest, blindest darkness of passion.
His body was soft and motherly; I stretched myself out on top of him and was no longer afraid.
“If we were ever to part,” I said, “who would I tell my funny stories to? When something funny happens I can’t wait to tell you about it.”
Who will I tell my funny stories to now? And do such funny things really happen?
I don’t know, I don’t really think so.
Perhaps what I flushed into the sewers wasn’t something human, but the fruit of an extreme feeling whose name I’ve forgotten.
Twenty-eight
At four o’clock this morning I was woken by a voice that led me to the study. It was the woman in brown with the slashed wrists.